I’ve registered for two teleconferences in the past week. The first sent me the dialing information 15 minutes after it had started. Another is going right on right now. It is 10 minutes in and I still have not recieved anything other than an invoice for an order that cost me $0.

Make sure your promotion doesn’t flops because you didn’t tell your visitors where to go. In fact, if your visitors have to search high and low to find something on your site — be it teleconference information, registering for a forum, or how to buy your product, you have already screwed up big time.

This week not only have these guys missed me as a listener, they have also lost some valuable backlinks.

If you are visiting the actual blog (rather than reading it through RSS) you will have noticed I’ve updated the design. The changes were simple; a dark blue gradient in the header along with a few other color changes. I will probably continue tweaking the design, but this look is here to stay.

I just added a feedburner RSS button & subscription counter. Unfortunately its not back counting all of you who are already subscribed, which will make me look silly for at least a little while. I actually have no interest in having a large reader base. Instead my goal is to capture the eyes of highly motivated entrepreneurs, marketers, and publishers.

Right now I am working on puting together new interviews with several influencial people in the industry. I believe at least one of them will be a real shocker.

If you are wondering about that blogging e-book I’ve been mentioning, it is still in the works. Three people have read it/are reading the first draft of it; so far the feedback is very positive.

A year ago I tested out Google’s Adsense for Search on one of my sites without much luck. It got a couple of searches a day and I could count the revenue in cents. I got rid of it and forgot about it.

Fast forward to yesterday; I re-implemented Adsense for Search into one of my sites. So far, I am impressed by the results.

So how does this help you out beyond revenue? It helps because Google tells you what your visitors are searching for.

Of course you could find this same information out by inserting your own search program, but using Adsense for Search is a lot easier.

After logging in to your Adsense account scroll all of the way to the bottom. Under “AdSense for search” click “Top Queries.” What are the top keywords? If your web site does not have that content, put it in. If it does, make it easier to find.

As an added bonus I’m willing to bet that search engine visitors are looking for these same keywords. Your top searches may be something you never even thought of when building your keywords list.

This is probably a little counter-productive since I’m still working on a blogging e-book, but I’ve just added a new category for “the blogging bubble.” Whenever I see a silly blog, like the LAPD’s blog I will make a post. Today’s sign — MC Hammer’s Blog.

Despite being a talk radio show addict for years I rarely listen to any web radio. Of the shows I have tuned into most are dull and not very informative. I think that is about to change.

If you are an active member of either Sitepoint or WebsitePublisher.net you are probably familiar with Jon a.k.a. Mook-Jon. He is the guy who posted the $81,000 CJ screenshot on Sitepoint back in January. He consistantly posts excellent advice which you would be foolish to ignore.

Despite several delays, Jon’s first podcast is now online with aguest, Matt from AffiliateBlog.com (highly recommend read, by the way.) This is cosidered a “beta” broadcast, his first full podcast will be over an hour. Topics covered in this one include: why Google sucks, Microsoft verses Google, Jon playing with a lighter, how his traffic test is going, Markus Frind, and a whole lot more.

Listen to the show and give them your feedback at Jon’s Affiliate Marketing Blog. There is excessive profanity here so you may want to avoid listening to it in the office (if you aren’t the boss) or if you are very easily offended.

A big part of my web background is in virtual worlds. When I was first getting started in commercial website publishing I was involved in creating an interactive virtual world. Unfortunately the project fell apart. However, my strong interest in this side of the internet has remained.

I was very suprised to read on Slashdot about how far along Second Life has come. If you are not familiar with SL, it is a 3rd or 4th generation 3D virtual world which was launched in 2002. Other than popular online role-playing games, SL dominates the virtual world market right now.

The thing that has made Second Life so unique is that their foundation is user created content. Programmers and artists are able to build just about anything they can imagine in 3D & other people around the world can interact with it.

Up until now I was aware that people were making money doing land deals in Second Life. Today I found out just how far that market has come along. There is a site called SL Exchange which allows people to buy and sell custom items. Just by taking a few glances at some of the things for sale it is clear that huge amounts of time and effort has gone into third-parties developing SL.

The thing that really caught my eye was this — “Soon after Second Life crossed the 100K subscriber mark in January, there’s been a rush of big companies itching to develop and promote their brand in the world: first it was MTV, then Coke, and now with SL at 225,000+, they keep coming: this week, for example, Twentieth Century Fox had a virtual world premiere of X-Men III in Second Life.” May be Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse wasn’t so far off?

SFGate reports that Google is going to be adding video advertising to their site: To view the video ads, which are as long as two minutes, visitors will have to click on a play button. Advertisers supply the commercials by uploading them to Google and then narrowing where they appear by individual Web site, keyword or Web site demographics.

I’d speculate that this would be integrated seamlessly into the existing Adwords system, but I could be wrong.

The question for all publishers is, how much will video advertsing boost CPMs? It could be big. I have been reading that some big ad buyers recently stepped back from commiting to traditional media buys this year, reserving the money for something else. (By the way, if you have the link to this story please post it in the comments, I can’t remember where I saw it!)

On the downside this may negatively effect businesses that rely on the cheap inventory of large-volume general traffic websites. In the end, publishers benefit the most.

This story landed on the front page of Slashdot today, so I decided it was worth talking about. The blogger at PlagiarismToday made a pretty in depth post about the issue along with proposed solutions.

Here is the problem — there are many bloggers out there (and forum poster too, I might add) that repost large chunks if not entire articles, only adding a few of their own comments. The writer points out that there is often no reason to visit the source, and instead just read that main blog.

If you do not own the copyright to something, you can only republish so much as permitted by fair use while sourcing the original article. That means a few sentences. It also may mean a thumbnail size image leading to the original picture (however, this is a grey area since Perfect 10′s lawsuit against Google.)

Should you be worried about another blog quoting your work and linking back to you? No!

Bloggers intentionally post high quality or controversial things specifically to get other bloggers and websites to link back to them.

I’m suspicious about this claim, specifically — “Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source.”

Blogs work because they are super-targeted news channels. A good blogger not only writes their own (semi-)original content but also feeds relevent news stories to his or her readers. Someone only interested in SEOing their e-commerce site may have little interest in my publishing blog. Even then, the differences between Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com and Search Engine Roundtable are huge. While Aaron writes wide marketing articles tieing into SEO, Search Engine Roundtable covers all the little details on everything from YPN doing direct deposit to releases of new SEO magazines.

What this means is that when one channel (another blog) heavily quotes you, if that reader really is interested they will follow the link and could become a regular reader of your channel (your blog.) And yes, sometimes they drop the original channel that led them there.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying copy other people’s blog posts and newspaper articles as much as you want. What I am saying is that when someone copies some of yours, and links back to you, it is a good thing, not a bad thing. As for your own actions, just follow copyright law and you will be fine.

I think I have mentioned before on my blog that eBay dominates the online auction market in the US, but Yahoo! Auctions dominates the market in Japan. The same can be said of other countries and online services. Why is this?

The reason why is because of critical mass. Once a social website reaches critical mass there is no reason to visit another site. If you can find what you are looking for on eBay, why even bother going to Yahoo Auctions?

Right now there are quite a few social sites out there trying to be the next Myspace. I can’t call them Myspace clones, because Myspace hardly was an original idea. What Myspace did differently is that it brought in users and reached a critical mass. Why should someone sign up for another social networking site if all of their friends are on Myspace?

Myspace certainly is different from eBay. Since Myspace is a social site there are many differents dynamics in play. For example, there is a stigma toward Myspace for people over 30. This market may be much more inclined to sign up to a business social networking site. With auctions it doesn’t matter who is selling your product, just that they have a reputation and a good price.

So what does a site that wants Myspace’s audience have to do to get it? They can’t just add new features (even if they are in AJAX) or pay $1.25 for every new member through an affiliate program. That company has to do something radically different and better in a way that can build momentum and pull the users from Myspace. Will another company be able to pull this off anytime soon? News Corp. is definately hoping they won’t.

By the way, has anyone ever considered that Google might attempt to knock eBay off in the near future? With their move into mobile, the still elusive Google Base, and rumours of a Paypal clone it seems plausible.

Many people have stated that you can learn everything you need to know about SEO for free, from forums and blogs.

Backlink building, keyword density, meta tags, all of these different elements are well discussed in public forums. Think thats it? There are many very effective techniques are not publicly discussed.

The best way you will learn advanced SEO techniques is to do your own testing. Google, Yahoo, and MSN change their algorithms all of the time. You just can’t keep up without testing out things yourself.

Here is an example of a test I did last year. I had never registered domains with dashes so I tried it out. I did not expect any great results but I just wanted to find out if it made a difference somewhere. A lot of theories fly back and forth on the boards and some of them are BS. For anyone who has been doing their own testing, you already know that. If not, you might be in for a few suprises.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying — reading about SEO is good: but you should be testing out the theories you read about. (In fact, you should be doing this in nearly all areas of business.)

There is no rule that you only need one site in a niche. Make a few sites for you niches and use different SEO techniques on each. Then, you can take the best techniques and apply them to other sites you run.